Comparison
DIY SEO Hub vs Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahrefs Site Audit is the crawler inside a much larger subscription. Its advantage is not the crawling; it is that the crawl sits next to your backlinks, your rankings and your competitors.
This does the crawling half, free, and gives you the data itself. Check their pricing and limits before deciding.
The short version
| DIY SEO Hub | Ahrefs Site Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no account | Part of an Ahrefs subscription; a limited free tier for verified sites via Webmaster Tools |
| Account and verification | Neither | Account required; verification for the free tier |
| Pages per crawl | 5,000 | By plan, far higher |
| JavaScript rendering | No | Yes |
| Off-site data | None at all | Backlinks, keywords, competitors, the reason to subscribe |
| Health score over time | Score per scan, with the trend on each report | Yes, with scheduled crawls |
| Raw crawl data | The whole crawl as SQLite, page bodies included | Exports from their interface and an API on higher plans |
| Security review | Yes, passive, on every finished scan | Not its focus |
If you already pay for Ahrefs
Use it. The crawl is good, it runs on a schedule, and its findings sit beside the data that tells you which pages are worth fixing first. Nothing here replaces that.
The one thing worth coming back for is the downloadable crawl, when you want to ask a question their interface does not have a screen for, or keep a copy of the site as it was on a particular day.
If you do not
A subscription is a lot to buy to answer “why is this page not indexed”. Start with a free scan, or one of the single-page tools, and pair it with Search Console, which is free and is the only honest source for what people actually searched.
That combination covers most of what a small site needs. The moment you need to know who links to a competitor, no crawler will tell you, and that is when a subscription starts earning its money.
Questions people ask
- Is there a free alternative to Ahrefs Site Audit?
- For the crawling half, yes. A scan here is free, needs no account and no site verification, and covers 5,000 pages. Ahrefs also offers a free tier of its own through Webmaster Tools for sites you verify ownership of, which is worth having if the site is yours.
- What does Ahrefs give me that a crawler cannot?
- Everything that is not on your site. Backlinks, referring domains, keyword rankings and competitor data come from their index, not from crawling you, and no free crawler substitutes for that.
- Can I scan a site I do not own?
- Here, yes, within reason: the crawler reads public pages, as any search engine does, and every scan gets a public summary report. Ahrefs Site Audit expects you to verify the project. Site owners here can claim their listing and unlist it.
Crawl the site for nothing first
Read next
- Compared with Screaming Frog — the desktop standard.
- Compared with Sitebulb — the one that explains its findings best.
- Query your crawl with SQL — what having the raw data actually buys you.